Publication Studio: Fast Food For Thought

A nimble new paradigm for small-press publishing.

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If you run in certain circles, you hear it every day: The
publishing houses are dying, and books are therefore dying. Writers, we
presume, are all also dying. The notion of bookselling as a corporate
moneymaker, as opposed to a pursuit of foolish love or curatorial
impulse, is a relatively new one, and also apparently short lived:
Despite the recent success of Swedish murder thrillers and Jersey Shore autobiographies, the major houses in New York are struggling simply to survive.

Portland’s
Publication Studio, however, under founders Matthew Stadler and Patricia
No, has for the past year been using new technology to rebuild the book
publishing model from the ground up. Rather than pay out advances the
author is unlikely ever to recoup, and then issue large initial print
runs that might just end up in the pulper, Publication Studio is one of
the first small presses to publish entirely on a print-on-demand basis,
with book profits split 50-50 between publisher and author.

Simply put, if you
don’t buy the book, the book doesn’t even exist; once bought, the book
is printed and bound at Publication Studio’s downtown offices next door
to Tugboat Brewing (this takes perhaps 20 minutes), then cordially sent
to your doorstep. Most of Publication Studio’s books are what Stadler
and No like to call “jank editions,” bound into covers made from
recycled file folders they get for free from an office supply depot. The
press has gone through three binding machines already in one year—Ol’
Gluey, Li’l Gluey and now Nü Gluey—and has a production capacity of
maybe 100 books a day. It’s printed nearly 10,000 copies of more than 60
titles since opening near the end of 2009.

Print-on-demand has
generally been the province of schmaltzy online, pay-to-play vanity
presses, but Publication Studio uses the technology to give itself the
freedom to publish bold, off-the-radar-or-map books more traditional
houses wouldn’t likely touch because they’d be considered too risky.
Since initial investment is essentially nil, Publication Studio is able
to pretty much publish whatever work it thinks has merit, without
worrying about marketability. Recently, this has included a new
translation of Walter Benjamin, an illustrated edition of Book 11 of The Odyssey (with a new prose poem translation by Stadler), a lyrically rich novel called A River Story by Washington author Anna Odessa Linzer and a wild art-world satire (Revenge of the Decorated Pigs) by former Whitney Biennial curator Lawrence Rinder.

“The traditional
publishing model is great if you have a lot of money,” says Stadler.
“…James Laughlin, with New Directions press, is a great example of what
you can do with an inheritance from a steel fortune, but he specifically
set it up so that he wouldn’t be profitable for 36 years. Most of us
can’t do that.” What Publication Studio has done, however, is create a
viable model for the survival of literature even as the big publishing
houses slowly crumble under their own bloat. It is, in short, a
self-sustaining, community-based, one-cottage industry for books. No
small thing, that.

MORE: Publication Studio’s offices and storefront are
located at 717 SW Ankeny St., 360-4702. Books available for sale at
publicationstudio.biz.